Effects of varying fiber length towards packet delay in Passive Optical Network

Passive Optical Network (PON) testbed has been the interests of many researchers nowadays to study the non-linear effects of fibers that could not be captured using simulations. The length of the fiber is significant because cost savings could be made with longer fiber by reducing the electronic equipment and real-estate required at the local exchange or wire center. In this paper, we vary the fiber length ranges from 5 km, 10 km, 15 km and 20 km to study the effects they produce towards the packet delay. The experiment is done in a Peripheral Interface Controller (PIC) based PON testbed, and validated by National Instrument - Universal Software Radio Peripheral (NI-USRP) based PON testbed. The results show that the percentage difference between each fiber length is very minor, where we can observe as high as 0.12% between 10 km to 5 km fiber length, 0.65% between 15 km to 10 km fiber length, 0.3% between 20 km to 10 km fiber length and only 1.1% between 20 km to 5 km fiber length.